The present invention relates to a field of computer user interface, and more specifically, to quick browsing of content displayed on a computing device.
Nowadays, the use of social network applications on a mobile device is increasingly popular. In the current social network applications, received information is displayed as a plurality of information items such as friend's updates, news from concerned areas, photographs, advertisements, web links, etc. Typically, these information items are displayed vertically in sequence from newer items, i.e., recently posted to the social network application, to older items with the newest item displayed on the top. When a user scrolls the screen upwards, the top information item will leave the screen from the top, and the next non-displayed information item will appear at the bottom of the screen. If the user continues to scroll the screen upwards, this process will go on as if all of the information items are in a queue, which is called seamless loading.
With the use of a social network application day by day, a user's social circle is growing with more friends and more areas or topics of concern, e.g., local news or organizations of interest. When the social circle of a user of the social network application increases the information pushed to his/her social network application every day, including friends' updates and also news of areas of concern, also increases. The user may feel overwhelmed by the tremendous amount of information since there are too many new information items each day and it may take the user a lot of time to browse all of them. However, if the user does not browse all of the recent information items, he/she may miss some important friends' updates or important news from his/her most concerned areas. Sometimes, the user does not want to see details of each new information item. Some information items are very long and take more than one screen size of the mobile device, and these information items may not be what the user is really interested in, which can make the user feel impatient.
One prior art discloses a method and system for leading a mobile terminal to browse a webpage in a reading mode. The solution in this publication provides a reading mode when browsing a webpage on mobile terminal. When a user accesses a webpage, a browsing server will filter unnecessary and invalid information, which includes advertisement, flash, and etc. Only valid information like text information is left on the webpage. This solution aims to remove browsing noises such as flashes, pictures and advertisements. Only text information is left for the user to browse.